{"id":5113,"date":"2018-11-06T13:57:45","date_gmt":"2018-11-06T21:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"\/blog\/?p=5113"},"modified":"2021-02-09T13:29:58","modified_gmt":"2021-02-09T21:29:58","slug":"a-day-in-the-life-of-editorial-how-the-industrys-only-comprehensive-tv-ad-catalog-comes-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ispot.tv\/hub\/a-day-in-the-life-of-editorial-how-the-industrys-only-comprehensive-tv-ad-catalog-comes-to-life\/","title":{"rendered":"A Day in the Life of Editorial: How the Industry\u2019s Only Comprehensive TV Ad Catalog Comes to Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

At iSpot.tv, we call ourselves \u201cprofessional TV watchers”, but what we actually do involves far more than just watching. At the core of what makes iSpot unique is our ad catalog, which is the most robust and accurate library of TV ad creatives in the industry.  In fact, if you\u2019ve ever googled a commercial, chances are you\u2019ve found and watched it via iSpot\u2019s catalog, which has been built off our proprietary ACR technology over the past 6 years.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m Jenny, an editor at iSpot.tv. Let me take you on a tour of how the industry\u2019s only comprehensive TV ad catalog gets assembled and maintained.<\/p>\n

\"MeetMy job entails reviewing content that our software detects as a potential candidate for a new commercial. One of my first responsibilities of the day is \u201cchopping\u201d (or editing the beginning and end timing of the ad video from the network feeds). As a new spot is detected, I must carefully trim the footage frame-by-frame to ensure we have a clean download of the ad creative. For the majority of the Editorial team, this is how we start our day. While our platform instantly recognizes all existing TV commercials, movie-trailers and TV show promos in real time, all unrecognized content is reviewed by me and my Editorial teammates. Over 20,000 raw video segments are manually analyzed by our team each week; and from that raw footage, over 5,000 new spots are ingested. Over 700,000 spots have been catalogued in our system to date.<\/p>\n

So, how exactly do we get the new commercials? iSpot\u2019s proprietary software extracts ad airings data from more than two-dozen data centers across the country and monitors where and when commercials appear on TV. The new commercials are sent to us for manual review, metadata input, and insertion into the catalog. Editors also spend time each day researching and confirming airings data across the 155+ networks that are monitored. iSpot\u2019s Editorial team is comprised of 20 individuals working 365 days a year \u2013 TV is always on and so are we!<\/p>\n

One important nuance we have to manually detect is distinguishing brand-new ads from new creative iterations. Not every ad that airs is completely new, as some are very slight edits from a previous version. Our software is impeccable at recognizing ads and the ability to manually review these subtle differences only adds to our data accuracy. For example, Toyota could air the same national creative, but with different pricing information every two weeks, and all versions would be accounted for in the iSpot catalog. In another instance, if JCPenney uses the same creative for a \u201c25% off sale\u201d or a \u201cBuy One Get One sale\u201d, we ingest and tag each version. As our clients depend on iSpot to accurately measure things like attention, attribution and creative wear to inform key marketing decisions, I must be extra vigilant about catching subtle distinctions and correctly categorizing all content.<\/p>\n

\"EditorialTypically, I spend my afternoon editing new spots that have been ingested earlier in the day. Songs, actors, products, promotion codes, pricing; all of these details of a commercial are tagged in our system manually<\/em><\/strong>. On top of that, editors also write a creative description for each commercial. So, if you’ve ever Googled an ad that you just saw on TV and noticed that the first search result links to iSpot.tv, it’s because all of the metadata and keywords that our editorial team tagged brought you to the public, \u201cbrowse tv ads\u201d section of our site.<\/p>\n

While the Editorial team shares many tasks, each editor is also a specialist. Across the team, you’ll find an editor that specializes in one or more of the following areas:<\/p>\n